Here's something fun to do with your knitting friends - how about a sock swap? You could set up personal swaps for anything really, but there's something special about socks - the effort involved. It's one of those rare gifts - almost like receiving a sweater with all those hundreds of stitches!
My Ravelry friend Piratered and I set up our own little sock swap. She made a pair of surprise socks inspired by me and I did the same for her. She sent me these gorgeous socks from the Atlantis pattern. I love the idea of a pattern named for an ancient civilization....especially since I'm temporarily living in the ancient city of Athens, Greece. So clever, that Red!
She stitched up these … [Read more...]

Why why why have I been so afraid of colorwork? I took the plunge and cast on to give it a try, using Ohdessa's Three Colorwork Coffee Sleeves pattern. I jumped right in with the five color snowflake and it came together in just a few hours! Doesn't my cup look cozy? :-) I modified the pattern by using fingering weight yarn scraps on 2.25mm dpn's. I simply cast on 72 rather than 60 stitches to start.
I was rather surprised to note how little yarn it used. Several of my colors were just mini skeins and it hardly made a dent in them! I was rather a fumble fingers - unable to knit with both hands, I just untangled my yarn as I went, changing colors every other stitch in some … [Read more...]

Carli is in the process of moving household and family to a different state, so in her absense over the next week or so, I'll pinch hit with some extra knitting posts.
When I was gathering how to's and tips on knitting with colorwork, I started by looking at the instructions for the pretty free patterns I'd found on Ravelry. I picked Odessa's Three Colorwork Coffee Sleeves because of how pretty they are, but when I went to download the pattern, I was thrilled to find two posts with detailed stranded knitting instructions on her Ohdessa Knits blog. The specific posts are: Colorwork Charts and a Free Pattern and Holding all that Yarn, which is a wonderfully detailed … [Read more...]